The platform-as-a-service market has been heating up over
the past couple of monthsas vendors finallybegin to understand the importance of thisburgeoning area

Companiesthat once seemedwary of
putting all their chips on the table with cloud platforms, such
asSalesforce with Heroku, are now preaching a
polyglot future for PaaS. Gartner too predict a bright future for
PaaS,estimating thatthe sector will be
worth $1.2bn by the year’s end.

As the big vendors come to town, what of the old guard? Red
Hat’s OpenShift arrived in August 2011, and despite undergoing
several makeovers in that time, it has established a steady
community backing. Reasons for that includeMay’s open sourcing of the cloud platform in OpenShift
Originand the team’s intentions to bolster
relations to other projects, particularly 10gen’s NoSQL datastore
MongoDB.In PaaS, it’softenabout how many strings you can add to your
bow.

Now, the OpenShift team have announced a tentative roadmap
for 2013 and beyond, in a state of playblogpost. According to Red Hat’s Juan
Noceda, a self-serviceWeb
Consoleand Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s
“High-Density App Allocation Technology” will be donated to
OpenShift Origin project within the next few months.

Additional features are slated forbefore the
end of 2012including supportfortrendynative Websocketsandnative support for Java Web and JEE containers. Currently
only the linked JBoss AS is native, so it’s welcoming to see
others. Crucially for customers, the public (OpenShift Online
Service) and private (OpenShift Enterprise) GA launches are
expected in 2012 as well, with Red Hat looking tojumpsooner rather than later.

Also announced this weekisa
partnership with PHP company Zend,which could be an
important step towards OpenShift becoming an everyman
cloud. An increasing number of PaaS vendors recognise
the benefits of offering a broad language pallette, and by adding
PHPdebugging, monitoring and application performance
capabilities, OpenShift could become a viable choice
foritscommunity.

Noceda asserts OpenShift’s polyglot intentions, indicating
that in 2013, additional languages and frameworks will
arrive,asprioritised by
the voting community. As it should be within any
large developer collective, the community get the casting vote and
drive the agenda. By the looks of it, we could see Memcached and
Redis appear, or perhaps native support to the Play!
framework.

Whatever arrives in 2013, OpenShift are going the right way
about creating an impressive arsenal of support to their cloud
platform, that should get equal backing in the community and within
the enterprise.